Will Scottish reform of the GRA end in Repeal?

[Readingmum01]

The discussions over self ID in Government rattled on for years and England and Wales decided against it, so will Scottish government insistence for self ID lead to public support for repealing the Gender Recognition Act?

If the Act isn't got rid of, there will always be calls for 'reform' - for non binary to be included, for the age to be lowered, for extra genders to be added.

Isn't everyone sick of this legal lie? Why should anyone have a falsified birth certificate?

I think it will lead to repeal but I'm not sure what it will take for enough people to 1.understand why and 2. How it could be achieved.

What do you think?

www.repealthegra.org/

I think people are working on it.

I do hope so. And sooner, rather than later.

I can't understand why the SG is so determined to see this crazy legislation through. It is as if they think they can manufacture good law out of bad law in this ame way as they think they can manufacture a female person out of a male person with a bit of admin.

I think it will be hard to repeal the GRA while we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, as the Act results from a case (Goodwin) we lost in the European Court. Interested to hear more informed views on this, though!

I'm sure someone with a better memory will fill in the blanks but from my recollection the case you are referring to was related two people of the same sex not being able to marry even though one party identified as a gender opposite to the sex of their partner. The problem would not arise now because we have same sex marriage and civil partnerships.

But yes we should repeal the GRA. Law based on fiction is an absurd precedent to set.

Now that same sex marriage is legal, I don't see there is any justification for falsifying the sex of people...Real inclusivity is men welcoming gender non conforming males into their sex segregated spaces. The GRA was done behind closed doors and nobody advocated for women-now we know what's happened we have to get it repealed.

Yes, it should be repealed. Mess of a law with a ton of negative consequences that never should have got onto the statute books in the first place.

The second reason back then was the difference in pension ages. This has now also been resolved because men and women have the same state pension age threshold.

Which leaves only the privacy issue - fully-transitioned homosexual transsexuals who had transitioned early, being perceived as the opposite sex but outing themselves when required to provide their birth certificate.

I would argue that latter reason is now largely irrelevant because the group clamouring for self-declaration of sex are typically not facing that problem of outing themselves with their sex almost always being completely obvious.

Wales hasn't decided against it but lacks the legislative powers to implement what Welsh Government says it commits to doing. They were quite clear in condemning the UK government's decision not to proceed. Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru have said that they will explore what they can do within the devolved powers to permit gender self-id. I don't think anything has been announced or discussed publicly to indicate how those 'explorations' are going.

There's a petition on this thread

Repeal the GRA www.mumsnet.com/Talk/petitions_noticeboard/4688427-repeal-the-gra

I'm not sure if it should be repealed or reformed, but it definitely needs debating

I'm horrified by what's playing out in Scotland - women who have experienced male violence not being heard by Parliament, and their testimonies not being recorded; the "person from the UN" (!) - special rapporteur on violence against women & girls Reem Alsalem, no less - being dismissed by the 'Feminist to her Fingertips' (?) First Minister. Shocking disregard for the impact of gender laws on women and kids, safeguarding & data collection and material reality.

I've looked into it and the reality we are dealing with is that we already have de facto self-ID both sides of the border - people whose biosex rhymes with "ten" running rape crisis centres, staying in women's shelters for 7 months, getting moved to the female prison estate with a rap sheet of the most serious sexual offences, teaching school children while immersed in the paraphilia-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.

This new-looking website has highly relevant info. You might find it illuminating @Readingmum01 https://repealthegenderlaws.wordpress.com

I agree with you that "reform" could rumble on forever. The act itself is self-ID, so the Scottish bill is basically marketing to 16-18 year olds to climb aboard the sex denialism train. What could go wrong, eh?

I haven't heard a single reasonable justification for enabling people to apply for falsified birth certificates with the wrong sex marker. If the law lets us lie about what, what's next? Self-ID age? Identifying as pregnant? Bonkers.

As to the 'how' of repealing the laws that enable those false birth certs, I supposed it boils down to more people knowing what's happening, and politicians latching onto the issue as a vote winner. I'd certainly vote for a party that pledged to end the political erasure of sex.

Both the GRA and the EA need to be reworked.

The GRA needs to be changed to ensure that no official documents are falsified. Birth certs etc should show the correct sex, and for any meaningful data sex is what matters and should be recorded, not 'gender'.

The EA needs to really go for utter clarity on the single sex exemptions. It needs to be made utterly clear that 'sex' is biological sex and has little to do with gender. Women also deserve to know that if something advertises itself as 'single sex' or for women, that means only females will be included and there will be no males included.

If a space is to be mixed sex that needs to be clearly flagged.

It's an interesting question OP. Because elsewhere, these changes were snuck through (the Denton's playbook).

But the SG is not able to tack these changes on to anything and it's being done as a standalone measure. It's therefore arguable that other countries wouldn't have had the same outcomes if they'd had to do it as a standalone item.

In fact, haven't they pressed pause in Spain? Not sure if the changes were being put through in conjunction with anything else though.

Having previously been agnostic, the last few years have convinced me the GRA should be repealed. It's bad law. Moreover, the purported reasons for it are no longer present. Why keep unneeded statute?

I am not a lawyer, but I have read the Godwin judgement (a while ago).
As I remember, the judgement was clearly based on an idea of fully transitioned male transsexuals who passed as women. There was NO assessment of the impact on wider society of the judgement, as the numbers of transsexuals were too small to have any impact on wider society.
The three main issues in the case were marriage, pension age, and ‘privacy’. Due to same sex marriage and equalisation of pension ages, the first two are no longer relevant.

I would LOVE for the UK to repeal the GRA, and for TRAs to go back to the ECHR and try to argue that the benefit in privacy to the tiny numbers of transitioners who actually pass outweighs the impact on women of allowing men to become legally female.

I believe that case was about the human right to get married, to have a family life, etc. now there is same-sex marriage, the GRA is probably redundant. Would be good to see it repealed. I believe there is a new parliamentary petition about this.

I sincerely hope so. Its been a disastrous experiment. Its dismantled the DBS system.
IMO falsifying legal documents could lead to the introduction of compulsory biometric ID.

@JoanOgden This blog seems to be saying that it shouldn't be all that hard. The Goodwin decision was turned into the GRA within 2 years, and even before that case men with...particular proclivities...were getting fake birth certificates from their mates in the civil service.

There is cognitive capture of international legal systems by gender identity ideology, and that's probably why the UK lost in the ECtHR, but not all EU member states passed laws like the GRA 2004, which was extreme legislation enabling people to get a falsified birth certificate with the wrong sex on it.

It's far from unusual for a member state to be technically non-compliant, if it deems a particular measure incompatible with a nation's norms and customs.

I don't see how UK norms and customs lend themselves to this sole exception for "legal gender." It creates a dangerous safeguarding loophole where applicants can can bury their real identity, and employees of institutions face criminalisation if they divulge what's obvious to the naked eye.

Do you not think that SS spaces should be compulsory? Otherwise we are relying on the goodwill of providers. The flaw with the EA2010 is that we only get SS loos or changing rooms at the discretion of the venue. If all the pubs, hospital trusts, gyms etc in your area are gender woowooed, you have no choice and no recourse except taking the venue owner to court for direct/indirect sex discrimination because they choose not to provide SS changing rooms or whatever.

Agree 💯
And it would bring the undefined concept of gender identity into law. Which would be bad.

The Scottish GRR would, I mean.

it’s all an illustration of the ‘hard cases make bad law’ maxim really. Especially when that law was made largely as a work
around for the problems in other laws (same sex marriage and state pensions in particular). It would have been better to sort out the problems with those laws, rather than creating a whole new law treating transsexuals differently from the rest of the population.

The GRA was always problematic because it is based on the impossible to define ‘living in the acquired gender’ - without resorting to stereotypes that narrow the scope of possibilities for the population as a whole. But it mattered far less when it’s was a very small number of transsexual people and there was a requirement for medical diagnosis and intervention.

The EA 2010 was poorly written in
it’s inclusion of ‘proposing to undergo’ gender reassignment rather than just people with GRCs. That opened up the door to some of the current crap in unforeseen
ways.

Of course, no one realised that in the last few years it was going up morph into ‘transgender’ and activism would try to shift the definition away from anything even vaguely objective towards some internal
feeling (that might shift on a moment to moment basis). No one thinking about the issues faced by transsexuals nearly 20
years ago envisaged any of this.

Nor did they foresee the impacts on society as a whole, or the large numbers of people with other protected characteristics - including the ones that everyone in society has (sex, sexual orientation, etc).

@ArabellaScott the thing about reforming the GRA so that identity documents can't be falsified is that, once you get rid of fake ID, there is nothing left.

The sole point of the GRA is fake ID!

And if the GRA is nonsense and has to go, so does the "gender reassignment" strand of the EA 2010, as that depends on the fake ID-enabling GRA.

As for clarifying the EA, sex is already clearly defined at s.212. The problem is that legal "gender recognition" was made law for the purpose of undermining sex, and it does that very effectively indeed.

Just look at who can get moved to women's prisons without any legal "gender recognition" process at all, no fake ID required.

Ooh has Spain pressed pause @ResisterRex ?

I think of the Scottish reforms as a marketing exercise mainly, herding more people onto the trans medical juggernaut for profit, and advancing the political erasure of sex for the same ultimate reason (c'mon, it's obvious none of this has anything whatsoever to do with 'human rights').

Nice to meet another repealer! Nobody seems to be able to say why the GRA should be retained apart from "be kind" to people who have had extreme body modifications. Doesn't seem kind to me to lie to them, and there are countless safeguarding issues caused by the GRA enabling falsified birth certificates etc.

@pinchpoint I totally agree that the bowdlerised concept of gender should have no place in lawmaking.

In fact, everyone, everywhere should stop using it when they mean sex. It’s caused no end of problems.

Non-practising lawyer here.

Goodwin was a divorced father-of-4 with a certain paraphilia that will remain nameless, close to retirement age, who demanded of the state a fake birth certificate and other privileges so he could IIRC work with children (or maybe that was his co-claimant, a man referred to in the litigation as 'I').

The legislation passed within 2 years of the UK's loss in that case was explicit that no changes to the body are required for someone to acquire a legal "gender" (in practice, fake ID saying they're the opposite sex).

This new <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/2022.12.03-214321/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/02/scottish-parliament-should-leave-gender-recognition-act/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">piece by one of the Yogyakarta signatories who now advocates to retain the GRA, on some truly bizarre and counterfactual grounds, makes that clear in the first line:

"In 2004, the UK Parliament passed (for Scotland and the rest of the UK) a very generous Gender Recognition Act, the first in the world (at the national level) to allow a change of legal sex without any physical changes to the transgender person’s body."

This makes it crystal clear that transgenderism is a subjective belief. IMO discrimination on the basis of transgenderism must simply be re-categorised as a protected belief. It's already there, since Forstater v CGD.